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// block 671168 · space · 18 February 2021

Perseverance lands on Mars

The moment this block marks: the confirmation of touchdown at JPL as the signal reached Earth, 12:55 in California, 18 February 2021, 20:55:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 671,168, 18 February 2021, 21:14:21 UTC.

On 18 February 2021, after a journey of 203 days and 472 million kilometres from Cape Canaveral, NASA's Perseverance rover reached the top of the Martian atmosphere at about 19,500 kilometres per hour. Some seven minutes later it was standing still on the floor of Jezero Crater, a basin 45 kilometres wide just north of the equator, where water filled a lake and fed a river delta about 3.5 billion years ago.

Nobody on Earth could follow those minutes as they happened. Radio signals needed about eleven minutes to travel from Mars, so the rover had already landed by the time the first news of its descent reached the antennas. Touchdown was confirmed in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California at 15:55 EST, 12:55 local time, and the first images, from its hazard cameras, came in right after, partly veiled by their dust covers.

Perseverance was sent to search the crater for signs of ancient microscopic life, and to collect samples of rock and soil: the first step in bringing pieces of Mars back to Earth. Tucked under its body it carried a small helicopter, Ingenuity.

The moment on this page is the one Earth received, not the touchdown itself, which had taken place on Mars about eleven minutes earlier. The first block mined after the confirmation, block 671,168, came nineteen minutes later, at 21:14:21 UTC. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.

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